1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to the field of information handling system management, and more particularly to a system and method for proactive management of information handling systems with in-situ measurement of end user actions.
2. Description of the Related Art
As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
Information handling systems have helped to make people more productive by promoting efficient information management and communication. A downside to the widespread adoption of information handling systems is that failure of an information handling system often leaves an end user in a bad spot. With a soft failure, the end user can usually get the information handling system running again by taking corrective action. For example, a re-boot of an information handling system fixes any number of problems by resetting the data in memory that is used by the processor. Such minor failures are an inconvenience, although a poorly-timed re-boot can lose data recently generated by the end user and not yet saved to non-volatile memory, such as a hard disk drive. A catastrophic failure prevents the end user from using the information handling system, such as where a hard disk drive fails to make booting impossible. In the event of a hard disk failure, an end user typically loses all of the data stored on the hard disk drive. To prevent a loss of data, end users typically back-up data at another information handling system or storage device; however, even when data is backed-up, some data created after the time of the most recent back-up is likely still lost, and the end user faces the inconvenience of having to load the backed-up data to a replacement information handling system.
One way to avoid the inconvenience of an information handling system failure is to determine that system is likely to fail before the system actually fails so that the likely failure can be proactively addressed before an actual failure occurs. In order to predict an imminent failure, some systems monitor operating parameters with hardware and software monitoring agents and analyze the operating parameters with reasoning tools for indications of impending failures. For example, detection of outliers, faults and early warnings of failures use real time data and intelligent algorithms, but at a high expense both for design of the systems and for computational resources generally needed to track all types of failure modes and their symptoms on an information handling system in the field. Further, many faults and failures do not generate patterns that are detectable in advance via data and algorithms.